Have you heard the rumor about Roomer?

A few weeks ago, I almost went to Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a long story, but I was basically trying to make straw out of gold.

The short story is that I got trigger happy and booked a good deal on a flight before I had time to consider the actual (versus the imagined) distance between Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island. I was trying to visit my friend Ginger. I knew I could stay with her, so I didn’t have to worry about hotel costs. The only problem was that Hartford and Providence are farther away than I thought. Plus, she has a cat and I am emergency-room allergic to cats. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. Or maybe I was wishful thinking.

Anyway.

I booked a hotel room in Hartford. I was mad that I had been dumb about the flight, so I did something even dumber: I booked a non-refundable room. And then I got pneumonia. I was going to go anyway, but then I missed my flight. Things seriously just got worse and worse.

So I was stuck with two nights at a hotel in Hartford that I wasn’t going to use. Ginger couldn’t use them either, because she was in Providence. So they just went unused. It was maddening (and expensive). And dumb.

Roomer to the rescue! (How I wish I could have yelled that, triumphantly, but I didn’t know about them yet).

Here’s how Roomer describes themselves (they do it better than I could):

Every day, tens of thousands of people cancel pre-paid hotel room reservations and get stuck draining their wallets to pay for an empty room somewhere across the world. For these people, what was sure to be an exciting and promising vacation suddenly becomes an expensive waste. And yet, on the flip side, there are always travelers looking to score a last-minute deal, whether for a weekend getaway or a spontaneous road trip.

We figure, why not bring these people together. That’s why we created Roomer: to connect the people who are stuck paying for an empty hotel room with the travelers looking for a sweet deal.

Sounds promising, right?

I tested it out by entering a few dates and seeing what happened. Mostly, they didn’t have anything available for where I was going and when I would be there. The one time that my dates and location synced up with their inventory, the prices for the available room were actually higher than the prices on the hotel website!

So I think they’ve got a few kinks to iron out.

Meanwhile, I really hope they make it! I think this is a great idea, and a service that I would clearly use.

Has anyone else tried Roomer yet? Would you?

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